Romeo Castellucci, director of the Italian theater company Societas Raffaello Sanzio, saw the structure of "Hey Girl!" in his head as he watched a group of young women at a bus stop.

He was thinking about their mornings, how they rouse themselves, stretch and dress, prepare a face for what will face them.

Women might have stood at that bus stop for decades, and no one else would have seen them in the way Castellucci did, as emblems of feminine experience from primal ooze to the present.

Theater mirrors reality. If that mirror cracked and its splinters fell into wells made of laser light, the metaphor might work for "Hey Girl!" It takes place somewhere in the deep structure of the ordinary, not its superego but its id. Of course that could describe a theatrical hell on earth, pretentious claptrap meets special effects. What saves Castellucci are his gifts for economy and his ability to express primary information through visuals, and emotions through raw, even abrasive music.

"Hey Girl!" opens on a stage shrouded in fog. The first notes heard are slow, as if the music itself is waking up. Light gradually reveals a gelatinous goo sliding from a table to the floor. From that goo, a woman emerges, naked as a newborn, followed by another. The two central characters in the production (Silvia Costa and Sonia Beltran Napoles) sometimes wade through muck, but the audience doesn't have to. "Hey Girl!" rolls hypnotically along, each woman a history of women, from Catherine the Great and Joan of Arc to Coco Chanel and Juliet without her Romeo.

Never are they abstractions. Fierce or broken, they are always rooted in the reality of the body, even when their faces become masks of their faces and their bodies are hard and blank, shining like stones in a stream.

Founded in 1981 and famous in Europe, Castellucci's company has never performed in the Northwest. Its range extends from classics of Western theater to original productions of ancient texts, such as Genesis. In the 1990s, the company won an Ubu Prize for resistance, after the Italian Ministry of Art and Culture sought to ban its productions. Public support caused the government to reconsider. In 2005, Castellucci was festival director for the theater arts division of the Venice Biennale.